


An Emotion Bent Out of Shape

by MantisandtheMoonDragon



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Acts of violence, Alien Biology, Alien Cultural Differences, Alternate Universe, Animalistic, Cannibalism, Child Abduction, Crack Treated Seriously, Creepy Fluff, Drama, Family Feels, Feral Behavior, Gen, Mama Bear/Papa Wolf, Missing Persons, Murder, Neutral!Pennywise, Pack Bonding, Parenthood, Pennywise's A+ Parenting, cat-like, creepy children, dark themes, lol, self-indulgence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 09:23:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12528140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MantisandtheMoonDragon/pseuds/MantisandtheMoonDragon
Summary: It was strange to the stranger, who’d never experienced the weight nor starlight-like warmth of offspring in its claws, how much it mattered that Mike got the protection he wanted.





	1. For the First and Last Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VoiceoftheSchisma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoiceoftheSchisma/gifts).



> This is a gift for a friend o' mine! It was going to be a long, long one shot, but I figured you'd want to get to the good stuff in equal measures.

 

Bill took his infant brother out onto the front porch as their mother and father fought tooth and nail behind them. Neither had heard the baby screaming, but it was only when Bill carefully lifted Georgie up and began walking with the baby steadily that the unbearable bedlam became manageable.

           

It was difficult to hold his infant brother carefully and close the door behind him at the same time. Yet, Bill fared as he walked from the living room and kept from looking back at the sorry state of his home. Instead, the child took everything in what lay outside his home, sending a wistful gaze at the wet, gray world made by the unending rain in his small town of Derry.

 

The rain was nice – it poured down from the gutters and dripped from the edges of the awning above them. Bill could feel flecks of water against his skin, and wondered to himself how rain could fall and still touch him.

 

The little boy watched the sky and the shivering trees with placid round eyes, rocking Georgie gently from left to right to soothe them both. The baby’s cries had softened into uncertain whimpers that arose whenever his older brother became too distracted. Bill was in the mood to swing his body from side to side until he got dizzy, but he more often did the opposite and became greatly still. Bill was so practiced in being still, quiet, and “not annoying” that sometimes either of his and Georgie’s parents found fault with that too – wondering dismally if their son was displaced by catatonia.  

 

Bill told himself to stay still as his legs ached from standing in one place for too long and his stomach growled when he remembered not eating since earlier that morning. He obeyed the mantra until the wind became heavier and shook the trees above the awning, and harassed the sheets still left on the clothes wire next to him.

 

            Bill’s attention spurred, as he turned in a circle slowly, and came to stop in front of the forgotten sheets that had been severely dampened by the downpour. The white cloth was see-through now, after being drenched and already thin to begin with.

 

Bill wondered if the sopping sheets had caught fire, when he noticed a flare of stark and brilliant orange in the gloom. The child narrowed his gaze, straining to see what it was when the color didn’t die down and remained alight, and soon Bill could identify a lone man standing in the rain. The man was hulking, towering above the clothes wires and so very close to touching the clouds that his red hair stuck out like devil’s horns above the gloom.

 The plain cloth surrounding him couldn’t hide his unusual appearance, as aside from the hair, Bill noticed that the man was extremely pale and decked in silver, with more red glazed over his lips and surfing the pallid skin. The red highlighted a second smile to frame the real one that the man was sporting, and Bill connected the dots after but a moment of consideration – the man was a clown.

 

“Hi.” The clown in Bill’s backyard waved cheerily, heedless to the rain that barely touched a hair on its enlarged head.

 

Bill rocked from side to side, still with an armful of his petite, infant brother. Though the boy’s spine tingled unpleasantly at the untold appearance of the circus worker, and right beside the Denbrough home, Bill only feared being impolite in that moment. His mother and father had, perhaps, not instilled a fear of strangers deep enough into him for Bill to recognize the gooseflesh over his arms and legs as warning signs.  

 

The expression on the clown’s face flickered from overly-joyous to a deep, histrionic frown that made the slivers of red daubed against his cheeks elongate, like paint as it absorbed a blank page.

 

“Aww,” He cried in that high, nasally voice that distorted ever so slightly into a grumblier mockery of itself. “Aren’t you gonna say ‘hello’?”

 

“H-hi.” Bill called eventually, remembering not to drop his brother as he acknowledged the strange man. Bill went silent, drawing it out to see if either his mother or father would stop shouting long enough to hear him speak.

 

No one came out of the house.

 

The clown smiled again, blue eyes shining in the dim light around him. “You look like a nice boy, but unhappy.”

 

Bill watched as an elegant but larger, gloved hand reached out to him, and he realized for the first time that the clown man had balloons in the other. It’d been a long time since Bill had seen balloons, especially ones so vibrant and red. His birthday had been recent, but the child couldn’t quite recall any balloons on that day when all the fuss had been directed upon the newborn Georgie.

 

“You look unhappy, Billy.” The clown’s voice was a whisper, pleasant and soft, perhaps even sweet. His rabbit teeth were pronounced upon his lips as he spoke, and it seemed to make the words that poured out of his mouth more cluttered and lisp-like. “I bet I could cheer you up with a balloon. You like balloons, don’t you?”

 

Bill nodded, hair catching in the little roll of cold wind. It made the chimes hanging above him and Georgie tinkle as they were meant to.

 

“Come and get one.” The clown said then, kindly still. “Come, come now.”

 

            Bill wanted to, surely. He wanted to forsake all else just to run and grab the whole bunch of them bobbing around as flashily as fireworks against a backdrop of drab grey.

 

He stilled when that niggling part of his brain and the bundle still in his grasp weighed him down. “But it’s cold… and Georgie… He’d get sick.”

 

            The clown nodded at Bill’s answer without hesitation, as if he’d expected it. “You do look cold, I agree. You look so unhappy and so cold.”

 

“I have to keep Georgie from getting too cold.” Bill agreed in a small voice.

 

It was odd, but just then it seemed like the clown was closer than before. Much closer.

 

“I could keep Georgie from getting too cold, too.” The stranger said, still dry and without a drop of rain on his satin suit. “I could keep you both warm. It’s warm underground. It’s warm where it never rains, and the lights from the circus tent are always glowing. That’s where I live, Billy. Do you want to live there, with me?”

 

Those eyes emerged like lights to Billy. As pretty and sparkling and unnatural as Christmas lights.

 

“There’s a… a circus underground?” Bill whispered in awe. The balloons were coming closer, too.

 

“Yes.” The clown was mere inches away, unblinking as he bent down fluidly to speak with the child at an affable angle. “It was an ordinary circus… till a storm blew the whole thing away, and me with it!”

 

The fiery-haired clown giggled contagiously, prompting the starry-eyed little boy to smile a shy, open-mouth smile revealing the gap where his two front teeth should’ve been.

 

As soon as it came, the happy demeanor of the clown waned and died into a more unsettling, serious trance. “It was an ordinary circus… but it was cold. We were all cold – everyone was yelling and screaming and they ignored us. Pennywise was so cold and alone…”

 

Those askew eyes never left Bill’s, though the stranger was holding out the balloons for the boy to take. Georgie had fallen silent and sleeping between the two.

 

“That’s me, Billy. Billy meet Pennywise. Pennywise meet Billy.” Pennywise extended a hand from himself to Bill and back, before gently squeezing the child’s shoulder. He’d caged the 7-year-old in, but had not yet scooped him up. So close, and yet…

 

            The Denbrough boy had been one that the eldritch being had scouted for weeks beforehand. Pennywise was always on the hunt, to see if this child or that child was worth investing in. Initially, what had garnered Pennywise’s attention was that the baby was never blamed for the neglect that Bill himself suffered. And that was even when Bill was clearly keen to an inordinate sense of self-preservation, the likes of which Pennywise could see himself coveting. The clown’s shrewd, yellowing eyes studied the child and wondered once more if Bill Denbrough was too old to be his.  

 

Pennywise lifted a single balloon between the two of them, and gestured for Bill to hold out his wrist. The clown man carefully tied the tassel of the balloon around Bill’s wrist, as they, together, kept Georgie from tumbling from his brother’s cradling arms.

 

Bill’s smile was sweeter now, while his eyes followed the balloons. He was completely enamored with them as Pennywise took the bundle that was his baby brother into his longer and larger arms completely. The baby weighed nothing, and from the look of Bill’s abnormally angular and thin face, neither would he.   

 

“Are you still unhappy, Bill?”

 

He feigned disappointment well, but delirious sparks of triumph burst inside Pennywise the moment the voices within the house, that had died down throughout their conversation, flared up again. It made the child dwarfed in Pennywise’s shadow cave in on himself.  The bantam boy’s eyes watered not from the wind, and he ducked his head down not from the cold.

 

 Bill tried to speak, with a tremulous look in the clown’s direction. “I d-don’t mean to b-b-be.”

 

His head canted in the direction of Pennywise’s hands when the clown brushed away his tears. Those hands were visible claws, and as sure as any little boy who believed in magic and myth, Bill was certain that he would die by them. Monsters, adults… it was all the same when it came to how cruel those that were bigger than you could be.

 

“No, _no_. _No one MEAns tO Be._ ” Pennywise kept kneeling, and with that impossible strength and grace, brought Bill inward and squeezed his shoulder as a comforting parent might. That aching caveat within was roaring less for Pennywise the closer it got to Bill. And like he’d imagined, all worry that the child wouldn’t fit in with what the alien had in store for him and his brother fell away like ice melting beneath a sweltering sun.

 

Bill rested his cheek against the stranger’s shoulder and closed his eyes, eyelashes wet with tears. Georgie was safely sandwiched between them. He listened when a rumbling began from some unknown source, and Bill believed it to be thunder. He could imagine that in the flash of blinding lightening to follow, the inhuman thing that had a grip on him would strike.  

 

            Bill buried his nose in Pennywise’s shoulder. “Am I g-gonna die?”

 

Unbeknownst to the child, Pennywise grinned and huffed quietly against his temple. The rumbling from within became denser, richer, as the horror preserved a constricting grip around the drowsy boy.

 

“Oh no…” Pennywise murmured, as he lifted Bill up from the deck of his home. “ _Why would I destroy what was MiNe?_ ”

* * *

 

Little, sparky Michael Hanlon – Mikey – had been the first that Pennywise had stolen and willingly kept beneath the hushed town of Derry.

 

Humans were inherently petty creatures, and while Pennywise himself was the pettiest being to exist in their plane, he couldn’t quite fathom why they practiced isolation by the most innocuous of unshared attributes.

            The entity had understood it over time, when he’d thought to give humanity a fair stretch in (unconsciously) teaching him how they existed from day to day. Pennywise, even before he’d claimed the name and the form, had had time to kill in-between meals. He also stuck to a rigid form of predatory advancement, testing the waters of what lay beyond his Well House. And with that came some concessions, including observing the generations of people that lived in his domain in everything they did. Pennywise had learned much and taken root deep within the lives of the people that were his own, feasting on the fruits of every little frightening thing that came into the Derry folks’ path.

 

They feared strangeness, yes. Yet, these people feared those whom were different even more.

 

At first, Pennywise had been unable to tell the difference. That had not been a mistake built to last, however, when the Hanlon family began to stock in a farmhouse that may or may not have been built by slave hands. Times changed radically, and still the It that was not quite a clown saw no change in the behavior between those who were paler in complexion and those who were dark.

The Hanlons were forever at a disadvantage through no fault of their own – not that Pennywise was going to interfere. Whatever evoked terror into the heart was more than welcome from It’s perspective; even if the crimes committed against that island of a family were always curious. As a matter of fact, there had been many disappearances and brutal deaths that Pennywise had had no hand in.

 

Case in point, when Mikey’s home in the suburbs – tentatively erected into a neighborhood of white people when Mike’s parents wanted to branch out from the farm – was burned to the ground.

 

            The blaze was glorious, though it had begun from a speck of human slime: three Derry police officers on their last rounds for the night. The men had drunken cheap beer and littered the ground with empty bottles and cigarette butts before one of them had come swaggering close to the unassuming Hanlon house with a soaking rag sticking from a bottle.

 

Officer Bowers had pulled out his lighter and from the shadows, Pennywise watched the young man showcase a feral grin as he plunged a bottle through the kitchen window. The men laughed uproariously and loitered in time to catch a few fireworks. Smoke plumed from the shattered window and sparks of angry red and yellow built up behind the remaining shards of glass hooked into the window sills.

 

            The officers left, wobbling and hooting into their car and never to return or to repent for their actions. Already the fire grew, its smoke consuming the entire downstairs of the home and rising upward, even as it billowed from every possible outlet into the open night air. Pennywise watched in silence, trying not to get too hopeful that the Hanlons would wake up and panic in alarm. You could never rely on humans to suit your needs when the opportunity for it to happen was perfect, as Pennywise had learned. Mr. and Mrs. Hanlon could die sleeping in their beds, for all the clown knew, and there was no point in pouting over it if that was the case.

 

The clown could not bring himself to step away from the house that was quickly going up in flames. Pennywise waited, teeth hedging from their gums and tongue lathering his lower lip, just in case that delectable taste could be detected in the air. The true predator in the cosmic horror could bide its time, for it knew that all good things come to those who wait.

 

His uncharacteristic patience in the moment paid off, when Pennywise perked up at the stench of cold, calamitous fear and the more telling sound of screaming from above his hiding place.

 

It was intoxicating – an atmosphere of chaotic fear, the kind that writhed in a stranglehold. The Hanlon family was doomed. Doomed from treading outside their social norms, doomed from being locked within a hothouse, doomed from being born with what had been deemed inferior features. Pennywise was driven by salivating desire to spindle his way into the home, brushing off the mad heat that turned what little air could not escape the building into visible waves.

The shrieks he followed got louder near the tippy-top of the house, where Pennywise watched a man and a woman trying to beat down the door of one of the rooms down the hall. They were trapped in a literal ring of fire, climbing to lick the ceiling as well as suffocate the couple.

 

Pennywise didn’t think much of whatever it was beyond that door, until the relentless pounding of hands and the horrendous wailing from Mr. and Mrs. Hanlon slowly withered and died. Their bodies curled like burning paper, fragile and now wafer-thin to the all-consuming flames. At that time, the clown had thought that all the fun was over, while he walked through flame and acid-smelling shambles of wood to survey the corpses. There was nothing left – their prying hands had only just scraped through the doorframe before melting down with the rest of them.

The jingling of Pennywise’s bells, as he stepped over their bodies in the eerie dead air, was interrupted by that human-screaming starting up again. The muffled vocalization came from the room that the Hanlons had tried with all their might to reach into, desperate and pitched to a hypnotic whine. And that was when the entity sought what lie behind that door.

 

Ah – Aha!

 

The creature raised one hand with a flourish, as he startled the only other living thing in the house.

 

The Hanlons had a child, barely more than a babe. Pennywise knew the boy the moment he saw him: Michael Hanlon wrung the bars of his drab crib and protested the unknown danger with shrill cries. He screamed his little head off, having just awoken to hear the flames crackling against his nursery door and the dying of his parents. All that was before Pennywise had stepped out into the center of the room like a ringmaster to introduce an all-new circus act.

 

Drool was already building at the corner of the clown’s ruby lips – waiting for the fear of Mr. and Mrs. Hanlon hadn’t been such a waste of time after all. Pennywise’s massive shoulders shook while he giggled in the middle of the room, which he realized with just a quick glance, was a soft and too-sweet room meant for a toddler.

 

            The clown wasn’t too hungry, but then frightening such a tiny, disgruntled welp of a human wasn’t going to require that much work nor preparation on his part. It was even better when Pennywise considered how long the child had had to be terrified at this point, as Mikey had been screaming for quite a while now.

 

It was perfect, before Pennywise sniffed the air and shook with disgust.

 

Disgust which only, _really,_ lasted for a minute at most before the entity froze in his fashioned cocoon of a body. Amid the fresh ash and the scent of burning carcass aiding in the dispiriting of pure terror and agony, was an electric sensation of a different sort. Mikey was fearless in his pursuit of safety and warmth.

The tiny boy needed no words to express himself, as Mike’s arms came up and were held out to Pennywise beseechingly. His big, warm brown eyes stared without an ounce of anxiety or wariness, for this child was too young to know what a villain was like. Mike only wished for a protector, and it so happened that Pennywise was the only being present.

 

In the end, it was surprisingly easy for Pennywise to wind his hands over the child’s ears and smooth down his curly wisps of hair with delicate precision. It was surprising, for the clown didn’t rip the child’s head off in that moment, nor did he open his unearthly jaws wide and dig into Mike’s soft skin with his daggers for teeth.

 

            The amount of trust and devotion, and the feeling of safety like a blanket made of the softest, freshest fleece and warmest wool worked like a stake to a vampire’s heart. The alien’s fate was sealed when Mikey touched Pennywise’s porcelain skin and clung to his wrist with tiny hands that could barely fit around them.

 

The monstrosity wondered – when the rattling that had begun inside of himself came to coil and lock within his impossible body, seizing like several hearts that, all at once, could take no more, and when the scent of Mike and his adoration for himself that Pennywise committed to memory – if, had he ever taken the time to hold a human child for as long as he’d held Mike Hanlon, if he would have been a different thing of his kind altogether.

 

            The baby boy babbled, begging to be picked up and Pennywise did just that. He let the dark-skinned boy nestle into his ruffled chest, grabbing at the clown costume with uncoordinated little fingers that crashed against the bells that hung from Pennywise. He lay, curled and content in the creature’s arms, needing protection as much as he needed air. It was strange to the stranger, who’d never experienced the weight nor starlight-like warmth of offspring in its claws, how much it mattered that Mike got the protection he craved. 

 

Mikey, within an instant, was claimed and converted, in Pennywise’s mind, into a necessity to be protected. His small, still-growing being was mapped out for the eldritch figure, and Pennywise breathed in deeply the scent of trust and contentment.

 

_Mine._

They traveled away from the debris of the former Hanlon home, and into the dark, damp night as quickly as smoke traveled through bare hands.


	2. Strange Circus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading!

 

            Georgie rolled around, squirming in his spot beneath the moth-eaten covers. The child stubbornly refused to use his limbs as he unfurled from the pileup of quilts and bodies keeping him in his stuff, cushy prison. There were arms enough around for Georgie to push as he rocked from side to side on his back until air hit his face like a splash of cool water in a humid summer morning.

 

            He breathed harshly, gulping in the fetid air of his dim room and turning to look at who’d caged him in his comfy prison. Georgie caught sight of Beverly’s freckled arm encircling his shoulders, and the shine of her red, red hair billowing from the air she inhaled and exhaled deeply in her sleep.

On Georgie’s opposing side, Ben had his plentiful face mashed against the side of their blanket mountain while he rested his chin atop Georgie’s head and unconsciously squished the tinier boy between himself and their only sister.

 

The others were nearby, with Eddie and Stan coiled together just a few sheets and covers away from the trio that Georgie was part of. Stan dwarfed the other boy, who was only a mite or two bigger than Georgie himself (but older, so he still had sway over Georgie’s behavior). And sure enough, when the youngest in the clutch looked up, he was met with the sight of Richie dangling halfway from within blanket mountain. The clumsy boy was sprawled within a dozen or so quilts and festooned in gaudy fabrics stolen over the years, and it was a wonder how he’d survived the night after being buried alive like that.

 

Had it still been a cold and stormy like the flash flood the night before, Georgie might’ve remained sunken with the rest of them, but he protested unappreciatively when their sleep-heavy bodies held him down in his personal burrow. Georgie realized with an unhappy huff that he’d need to get out with effort; he was awake – therefore everyone else needed to be awake straightaway as well. Although, as the baby of the group fought to get out, scraping and scratching without thought, Georgie simultaneously searching for the one that needed to be awake ‘the most’.

It wasn’t hard to find him, as instinct and predictability were on Georgie’s side when his eyes darted straight toward the only source of light in the room.

 

Bill had fallen asleep a dark silhouette against the cellular arched window, where the yellow light of dawn bled through, once again.

 

Georgie kept his eyes on his older brother, even as he relished freedom from Beverly’s vice-like hold. He wasted no more time after, while he crawled on all fours and got close to nose at the older boy’s hair and around his neck until he got Bill to stir.  

            His older brother groaned while Georgie could see the sweat gleaming from his forehead and the light circles underneath his eyes. Bill stared wordlessly at the other boy for the longest time, unable to process the image before him.

 

Finally, he yawned. “Georgie…”

 

            Georgie grunted at the call of his own name and held his arms up. Obediently, Bill enveloped his little brother with a hug and patted his back, still yawning while he strained to stay awake. Bill was unusually tired that morning, perhaps due to being one of the last of the children to be herded into 29 Neibolt House yesterday. The decision brought aches and pains to the preteen’s bones, but he took his role as the responsible one very seriously and wouldn’t have left Georgie out to dance in rain puddles until who knows when.  

 

            Said little boy beat a feeble fist against Bill’s chest to get his attention and squeaked, sounding very much like the rats that lived below them. Bill hummed low in his throat in question, but knew what was bothering the little boy by the diminishing flush in Georgie’s cheeks and the dull glaze over his dark eyes.

 

“P-p-p-p-p,” Georgie spelled it out with the smack of his lips, placed close to Bill’s ear as if he were sharing a secret. “P-p-pop? Pop, pop?”

 

Bill moaned, lifting a hand and stretched his fingers up over the light blazing behind the window shade. He was torn between wanting to stay where it was warm and where he could doze for another hour or two, but his stomach had other plans. A watery growl arose from the pit of Bill’s tummy, as though the mere imitation of snapping bones and cartilage – was enough motivation to change his mind.

 

            Ostensibly, it was.

 

Bill teased his little brother by nipping at his nose, and he earned a peel of laughter from Georgie before he was nodding toward Mike, who slept nearest to Bill’s chosen spot often. The other boy, closest to Bill in terms of brokered responsibility, was slumped against Georgie’s old crib, which creaked and groaned in protest with the slightest weight upon it.

 

Bill grunted for emphasis, and Georgie nodded vigorously before padding over to Mike to wake him next. Bill laughed loudly when his kid brother flopped over on Mike’s unconscious head and startled him upright.

 

Georgie was bouncing with joy. “Pop! Pop! Pop!”

 

* * *

 

 

The pipe-lands beneath 29 House were cavernously large, well-suited to house the echo of their footsteps as the entire group navigated through them. The oblong, person-sized tunnels provided them with a steady susurration of flowing water, as well as thumps and thuds of indiscernible objects traveling parallel to their ragtag group. Funnily enough, none of the children had ever explored the entirety of Derry’s sewer system, although their father had taken them to various passageways in the past. Bill had a good head for remembering where one pipe connected to another, but neither he nor Ben nor Stan could’ve known for sure where every which way would lead them.

 

Without Pennywise, they were always going to be a mite too directionless. Or so it would seem.

 

Mike led the way while Bill took up the back to keep stragglers (namely Georgie and Richie, and at times Ben) from getting lost. Today it was Richie who got held up more than once. The boy, tangential to Bill in age, was almost a clone of their youngest sibling when he meant to make mischief. Unfortunately, he’d found a great source for in it in the form of a set of markers that had appeared along the street of Neibolt yesterday, and Richie had taken to drawing all that his heart desired over every surface in sight.

Bill had to continuously push his brother by the shoulders just to keep Richie moving, while he saw fit to scribble angry faces and string nonsensical words all along the sewer line.

“Move!” Bill groaned for what had to be the eighth time. “Move! Go! Richie!”

 

The boy turned a quarter of the way in the right direction to face Bill and hissed loudly. He swiped his blunt nails through the air, but being unable to see Bill, Richie couldn’t touch him. It was more annoying than it was threatening.

 

Bill sighed with irritation and moved ahead of Richie as though he were going to leave him there. At the last moment, the unofficial leader of the group snatched the partially-blind boy behind him and began dragging Richie, kicking and shrieking, through the rest of the tunnel entrance.

 

“No! No!” He’d growled, trying to wrestle away from Bill like a stubborn mule. By the time they’d reached the more colorful but shedding trailer that marked the grander level of their home beneath home, Richie had given up the fight.

 

            He, like everyone, immediately encircled the familiar car where they knew it was warm and fiery inside. This was the first place to check whenever they came down into the sewer, courtesy of the well that sat beneath their aboveground home, and didn’t spot their guardian right away. Pennywise rarely made it easy for them, if he ever did at all – though the children had been marked as precious and infinite long ago, their reflexive surprise and fear was still invigorating for the alien.

 

“Pen?” Eddie called first, high voice echoing along with the drip, drip, drip of water nearby. Everyone could see much better when daylight came flooding from the tower above them and the tower of toys leading up to it.

 

Ben stopped in his sluggish, still sleep-ridden movements to eye a boy that floated in the ether. The unlucky child looked fresh compared to the others that rotted above as they rotated in the air, and without thinking, Ben began to salivate at the sight. He tripped and skidded in grey water for not paying attention, and Ben pouted when none of the rest of them shared in his discovery. Eventually, Ben let it go – the new kid was too far up to reach anyway.   

 

And hopefully, Pennywise would come and take them out to eat soon.

 

“Pen! Pen!” Georgie jumped in the water, but was saved from tripping himself by Stan lifting him onto high ground. “Pop! Pen? Pen!”

His enthusiasm was met with silence, that which made Georgie’s face redden and screw up with impatience. He was a spoiled child, certainly, but Bill let the little boy build up steam as he, instead, surveyed the dark corners in the tank holding them. It was best to just let Georgie go on and cry or throw a fit if he didn’t get his way. At least the runt of their litter tired quickly when that happened.

            The others had called again, one by one. Bill threw his hat into the ring when they’d yielded no results.

 

“Pen?” His voice was stronger than the others, aside from perhaps Richie or Bev. Bill’s vocals, his tongue and teeth, knew how to shape English words well given his experience aboveground that departed from their other siblings.

 

At times, Bill wished that that was the only part of his past that he could remember. “P-Pen? Peh -”

 

The ruddy and smudged leader gasped as fingers eclipsed the barrier from invisible to visible. Bright white gloves struck from the shadows nearby and closed around Bill’s wrist as he stumbled back from the telltale jingle of bells and swish of satin stretching over muscle and tightly-seamed white skin.

Bill darted away unthinkingly, succumbing to fear mode even as his brain connected the hand to the rest of the figure outshining every bit of darkness among them. High-pitched cries of alarm and delight abounded just as Bill fell onto his rear, panting harshly after that brief panic had relinquished its hold on his senses.

 

Bill blinked rapidly, before he saw the vision that had gotten a jump on him while he’d been distracted.  

 

In front of him, the gangly clown stood primly, legs crossed and arms twined together in what looked like an uncomfortable pose. And just as soon as they’d seen him, the sneering Pennywise, without preamble, toppled over to his side, limbs and all sprawling along with him until he’d collapsed and lay still as death on the damp sewer floor.

 

Pennywise’s audience were stunned into silence as well as stillness, or at least you could assume as much. All but Georgie, who’d already been skipping ahead to get to the massive figure. His eyes had been alight with excitement the moment that Pennywise had come into view, but turned from bright galaxies to worried husks of which as he approached.

            Georgie curled up in the nook between Pennywise’s two lifeless arms, and laid his diminutive hands against the red and white cheeks of his guardian. He prodded at the faux flesh of the clown’s face, poking around his nose and oversized forehead with a concerned look. Georgie was still so young, and it often took him a moment to accept behaviors which contradicted each other. The little boy knew that his father never slept, not ever – and that memory overruled Pennywise’s nature to provoke and spook.

 

Georgie bemoaned the prolonged silence, crying like a frightened fox cub before the gentle sound of bells shaking beneath Pennywise’s body grew audible. Only Bill started where he stood when the clown’s body snapped back to life, and his gangly arms wrapped around Georgie and pulled him in like a boa constrictor ensnared its prey. And like clockwork, the little boy was all smiles and laughter again, bracing himself against the grinning alien’s shoulders to get a better look at that painted face and assure himself that Pennywise was, in fact, alright.

 

            The rest of the boy’s siblings clumped together and scuttled forward to surround the duo not a moment later. Pennywise was patient as he welcomed them, one and all, with open arms. Instantly, Eddie was digging into the monster’s side, grappling at the silk and satin suit that never failed like a barnacle scabbing over a whale’s belly. On the other side, Mike took to tickling Georgie’s sides so that the smaller boy would let up before he was lifted onto Mike’s lap. They settled that way, as Mike leaned against the clown and soaked up the familiar presence, with Pennywise keep him secure with one arm that had been latched onto by Ben. Stan hovered nearby, his hand firmly grasping their father’s while he sat on one of the old, moldy rocking chairs that lie down in the cistern.

And Richie and Bill both rested over the clown’s free shoulder and against his raised hair respectively, with Richie needing to be helped over the slump of concrete that separated sewer water from walkway. His sight was usually questionable at best, but the boy made do with the instinctive help from his siblings and their father on nearly every occasion, especially where it was dark and easy to fall.

Beverly was one of the last to come, to wind her arms around the clown’s neck and hold onto him tightly. His attempt to return the embrace was met with laughter, as the rest of the children cling to his arms were dragged forward and back like ragdolls.

 

            The brood stayed close, even after their ritual greeting. It was never going to be easy, to be far away from their guardian and in a completely different plane of existence, as Pennywise liked to call it. Bill come to rely on the one that he and his siblings referred to as ‘Pen’, and had all but escaped the terror that his former life had been. Yet, dreamlands were an entirely different territory that their parent could offer no help in overcoming, and it surmounted the layers of dirt and decay that existed to physically drive them apart from each other when each night arrived.  

 

“Sleep?” Pennywise enquired, shifting eyes focused on Mike.

 

Without looking, the pale creature stroked the errant curls from over Ben’s eyes and in the same motion straightened the worn shirt clinging around Eddie’s thin chest. He lingered where Ed’s heart was and felt its strong pulse beneath the weak ribcage with some satisfaction. They’d gone several weeks without Eddie’s heart or lungs giving out from excitement, mainly due to the anticipation of hunting around the Barrens and the quarry. They were a field in and of themselves, brimming with a mass of families taking their summer vacations in stride. It was excitable for most all of children, as well as Pennywise itself, but Eddie didn’t adapt to it quite as well as his siblings did.   

 

Mike, in the meantime nodded. “Mmhmm!”

 

He murmured an affirmative that there hadn’t been incidents and that everyone had managed to go to bed when they were supposed to. It wasn’t the truth, not when one counted the fact that Stan had tried to mimic of the hooting of a Great Owl for a whole hour and that Beverly had teased Eddie by chasing him around the kitchen and up the stairs. Last night, Georgie, grumpy from being kept in by the rain, had bit at everyone’s fingers and elbows at one point or another, and Richie had drawn all over the bathroom wall with his markers – but if Pennywise didn’t know that now, he was never going to.

 

“Goody, good, good.”

 

The clown placed a hand behind Mike’s neck and bowed his head forward. Pennywise touched the boy’s curls with his nose, prodding at the bedhead that the kid was sporting impishly. He snuffled noisily, pretending to gobble him up as though he were just any old child and not one that belonged to the cosmic entity. A swell of affection, still as novel as it’d been when the clown had stolen Mike away, weaved its magic in the alien, energizing him as rainfall might with almost dead flora. The surge of it grew powerful when Mike backed away, laughing and squeaking like a little child.  

 

            On Mike’s lap, Georgie sought attention again by forgoing his prior nuzzling phase and looking up at Pennywise brightly. Beverly yawned loudly from her seat on Pen’s knees, and it started a chain reaction that the clown indulged in. He yawned with the rest of them, baring a dozen rows of razor teeth, and it prompted the youngest child to flash his own pearly teeth.  

            Georgie pried his lips open and snarled as much as he could, practicing a scary face that could never hope to match Pennywise’s own, whether their father was being lackadaisical or threatening. Georgie didn’t think about it, for the child had never known a time when his parent wouldn’t encourage this kind of behavior, and he only wanted to play.

 

Pennywise rewarded said playfulness with a simpering smile of jagged ivories.

 

“HuNgRY?”

 

The little boy seemed to remember himself at the sudden question, and stared into the veins of orange and yellow that scarred the insides of Pennywise’s blue irises.  

Georgie stuck his lower lip out while his dark eyes swallowed up the rest of his face as he pleaded with the clown. He was reminded of the empty gut he’d been sporting since that morning quickly. “Pop, pop?”

 

Pennywise rumbled, bringing Georgie closer and into the hollow of his broad chest, and grinned. “Yes, yes. Pop! Pop! Pop!”

 

The horror looked around with its unaligned eyes, and observed the ready sea of grinning teeth and exuberant, ruddy faces with an approving purr.


	3. They come in 3s but also 4s

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> / You are my sunshine, my only sunshine / You make me happy, when skies are grey /
> 
> / You'll never know, dear, how much I love you / Please don't take my sunshine away / ...

It was frustrating, even maddening, to be so content and still so empty at the same time. Pennywise had never felt anything like it before, especially not when it came from within himself.

Human beings could be beset by a combination of conflicting emotions and it never mattered to IT then. But now he puzzled over how such puny and dully-made creatures made of clay and meat dealt with it all the time.

 

The near simplification of a camaraderie with the very race that fed Pennywise very nearly took root in the horror’s mind, but the answer clicked the first-time Mikey planted a slobbery kiss on the clown’s ear. The child had laughed, groping for the clown’s red nose and red hair as he crawled about his father’s chest and pressed his pudgier face against Pennywise’s cheek. And, that feeling that Pennywise could only ever hope to label as possessive delight reinvigorated his ache.

 

The answer was thus: he needed a full brood, not just one little creature to protect and keep near.

 

* * *

 

Edward Kaspbrak had been born prematurely; a tiny, squalling baby whose skin already began bluing because his underdeveloped lungs couldn’t take in the air he desperately needed. He’d been rushed from the maternity ward to neonatal care before his panicked, thrashing mother had had the chance to hold him in her arms.

 

To make matters worse, Sonia’s husband had left not long after Eddie’s birth, having decided to escape living with an already tempestuous wife and a fragile baby. The decision had come at a time where it was beyond questionable, and where the town of Derry felt properly piteous and outraged on the newly-single mother’s behalf.

Yet, that was the only bit of sympathy lent to Sonia by the end of the whole ordeal. No one wanted to seriously deal with Mrs. Kaspbrak if they could help it – apart from giving her and her surviving child some uncomfortable winces for smiles as they passed by.

 

That grimacing, unsteady politeness extended so far as to just outside city limits, where Derry General Hospital sat. As far as Sonia was concerned, the hospital was the only place that mattered in handing out help and forgiveness, as ever since the birth of her abnormally small child, her hypochondria had increased ten-fold. The doctors and nurses that staffed the same hospital handled her with icy care and compliance demanded of them by medical ethics, and their state-issued pay. It was as entertaining to Pennywise, if he let the heavyset woman entertain his thoughts at all, as watching a worm wriggle on a hook. She would die in a hole in the ground someday… but that wicked catharsis evaporated just as soon as Eddie fell under her hawkish ‘protection’.

 

Like every living thing that was born and that died in his town, Eddie’s birth was felt and only an exception in so far as the sewer-dwelling entity could ascertain. The child had, like many, a spark of something inside him that began in the heart and strengthened with the mind. When Eddie reached the point of taking care of himself at three-years-old, bowing to the hysteria that made his mother helpless and writhing, still so much like a disgusting worm, that that spark burst into flames.

            Pennywise felt that wildfire starting inside the child just as he’d felt the boy’s birth, and it was only then that the clown was engulfed in an indignant rage on Eddie’s behalf. He felt it from a far distance, peering through storm drains and emergency fixtures like a fuming god when Sonia, for the millionth time, drove herself and her son to Derry General when Eddie had merely sneezed thrice.

 

* * *

 

At most, Eddie had a mild cold or the beginnings of the flu and could have been just fine if he’d been able to rest at home. No one could convince Eddie’s mother of this however, not when she demanded a stay in the hospital just to make damn sure that she and her baby weren’t dying. And it had frightened Eddie so much that his screams had forced the nurses’ hands.

The staff had given in with minimal fuss, choosing instead to prop the tiny family up in a backside ward for a day and talk about the hysteria of Mrs. Kaspbrak behind her back. The petty gossip fed Pennywise’s dark and Machiavellian humor over the situation as he snuck directly into the cramped bathroom in the Kaspbrak room unawares.   

 

The bathtub drain widened until it was fit enough to allow an enormous, human-ish head through it. Pennywise looked above the rim as an alligator stared above the surface of a lake, ensuring that there would be no unplanned accidents to give him less time. Pennywise had more than a feeling that he’d need time where Eddie was concerned.

There was no one. Pennywise made the drain expand until it became an impossibly wide sinkhole of pitch blackness while he emerged, shaking off the slime and grease that had clung to his suit. The original plan that the clown had had in mind was to appear covertly, as another faceless nurse that Eddie could trust (if his mother allowed him even that). Pennywise had paused long after that plan, rumpling the silks still wrapped around his favored form, much like a nervous rat gnawed at a block of wood.

 

            Eddie was, through pure observation, going to be difficult to take. Mikey had longed for protection and hadn’t, surprisingly, been given incentive to be mistrustful of helping hands. Pennywise had wondered what it would take for his next intended son to accept the new life awaiting him. What would it take for Eddie to accept Pennywise himself, if IT chose to hide that preferred guise away like some embarrassing picture from long ago?  

 

He’d paused. Genuinely paused, then discarded the original idea and shook out his arms and legs until the jingling of Pennywise’s bells settled the alien into a renewed state of peace.  

            Stepping out of the tub, and shaking out his limbs this time however, Pennywise condemned those infernal baubles for being such tells. He growled away the annoyance, knowing that this emotion bubbling from deep within was a nervousness that the creature wasn’t used to. Pennywise swallowed back a bucket of drool and poised himself like nothing in the world could touch him before slipping through the thinnest crack between the bathroom door and the shared Kaspbrak room.

 

The room was overflowing in white light from the television set beaming down on the pair, but Pennywise had discarded luck with his plans and had chosen to invade the ‘safe’ ward when he knew that Sonia would be sleeping. The clown might’ve trusted luck and assumed that Eddie would be asleep as well, but he knew better. As expected, the boy was glued to the TV, fingers in his mouth when they shouldn’t be once his mommy was finally snoring in her own bed. Eddie’s pale skin was riddled with goosebumps in the sanitary, conditioned room, making Pennywise ‘tsk’ at how little warmth the child had been given.  

 

The complete lack of a quiet front on Pennywise’s part drew the little boy’s attention away the TV, and with it came a tinny gasp as well as the visible rolling of his flesh over his knobby arms.

 

The boy and the clown stared at each other, all while Pennywise felt the hung-drawn panic slicing the boy’s mind into ribbons. He’d never seen a clown before, but this person hardly looked like a person to begin with, being so chalky-white and red and boring yellow, yellow eyes into Eddie’s person like hot pokers into steel.

Whoever this stranger was, Eddie didn’t know, but he knew that this was no friendly nurse nor doctor – none of the people that the boy had made coould’ve possibly been tall enough, gigantic enough to fill up the whole room while just standing there.

 

“ _Mama!_ ” Eddie yelped, predictably crying the instant he could move. “ _Mama!_ Mama!”

 

The tiny boy, too small for his age, hiccupped through his tears when the panic stopped just long enough to give him the motivation to save himself. Unfortunately for Eddie, that amounted to, more or less, the option of hiding beneath the blanket or taking the risk of physically going to wake his mother up in her bed.

            He chose the former; rushing to bury himself from head to toe in hospital-issued blankets.

 

“P…ea…s…” He mumbled in his limited vocabulary, beneath the covers. “Pl…ea.”

 

“ShHhHhhHh.” Pennywise whispered, claws already wrapped around the threadbare blanket. Eddie tensed at the enclosing fingers over his arms from outside the useless safety ward, and Pennywise chuckled. “SiLlY, swE-EEt bOy.”

 

Eddie whimpered loudly, but not so loudly as to wake his mother. He couldn’t.

 

 Pennywise ignored the terror, seeking a better prize while he slid the covers from over the boy’s head and cause him to freeze like a deer in headlights. Pennywise, instead of snatching the frightened child up while he had the chance, took to calmly folding the blanket around Eddie’s tiny frame. He remained stunned in a cloth-cocoon of the clown’s making, and looked absolutely adorable in said straightjacket-like bedding.

 

            Pennywise sighed at the moons for eyes that shown against Eddie’s pale, drawn face. He nodded off-handedly as he slowly helped the boy scoot along the bed, and get closer and closer to Pennywise while he did.

 

“ShHh – ShUsH, SHusH, ShuSh.” Pennywise soothed, already running his nails through the boy’s dark hair, careful not to harm him the process. “ _THe oTher N IgH t, deAr, whiLe I LAy S s Le EPINg…_ ”

 

The shaking body beneath his calm, reverent caresses was losing its energy. Eddie had already used up a day’s worth of energy before the clown had even arrived, all for the sake of his mother. And the thought made Pennywise, during his pacification, level a truly vindictive glare at the unconscious body of Sonia Kaspbrak.

 

“ _I drEAmeD I H eLd Yo U iN my ArMs / WheN I AWOkE, DeAr I w As MisTAK eN /…_ ”

 

Sonia did not get up when Eddie was lulled into a dreamless sleep, or when he was hefted from the lonely bed of isolation that she’d besot him with and cradled in the arms of a monster. Pennywise spared a moment to marvel at the round little being in his arms before he bared his teeth in an outrageously cruel and smug grin. Another little baby, all for him… It was so easy, and all that the alien regretted as he stowed away as quickly as he’d come, was that he wouldn’t be there to see the mother scream over her loss.

 

“ _… / AnD I HUnG My head and I cried…_ ”

* * *

 

_More. More. More._

* * *

 

There couldn’t have been a more perfect child to experience the light.

 

As the girl waited in the soft twilight with one of her daycare workers, a short and stout teen girl already anxious for having to wait after hours, Beverly searched for anything more interesting to settle the uncomfortable beating of her heart.  

 

Beverly Marsh was a smart kid –  keen and apt in the quiet way. Her smiles, even when she was tiny, were always quirked and knowing no matter who she gave them to. And no one would’ve disagreed with the ideal that she, unlike most, was an old soul trapped in a fledgling body, with brilliant copper hair that blazed in the waning sun.

Like an old soul, she knew routines were hard to bend, let alone break. She was on her toes, literally and metaphorically, as she felt the approach of her father in his beat-old car headed up the hill to them. He was late often and rarely if ever on time to come get her, and while Sunny Hill Daycare was never pleased to be kept waiting, especially given the curfew set on the town, Beverly was. Just a few more moments without having to suffer the presence of Alvin Marsh, up close and in-person, were crumbs of blessings.

 

            The redhead picked at the scabs circling down to her elbow. A near dotted line of flea bites from early that morning had bothered her all day. She watched that beaten card coming up like Al Marsh was driving on the highway with nothing to lose (it made him seem sincere when he came up to each teen girl, all apologetic and frowning deeply). And Beverly wondered how much her current volunteer, Kate, hated having to comb out the fleas and flea eggs that had buried beneath her waves of hair.

The Marsh apartment was small, and had never been too clean to begin with.

 

The door opened with a little trouble, but her daddy didn’t even bother getting all the way out. He opened his arms to intercept her, throwing out a wounded tone and an animated apology, and Kate accepted it with a blush and a smile.

 

Al’s vision locked on the small body toddling toward him. Beverly never blinked, wispy red hair hanging just below her narrow shoulders in the cold wind, while she dutifully walked up to her father. The town curfew wasn’t much of the savior it was meant to be, not for Beverly Marsh. Her father had come to get her too soon, and seemingly always would.  

 

There couldn’t have been a more perfect child to catch the monster of Derry’s eye

 

* * *

 

 Beverly instantly kicked off her shoes in a hurry at the door, then sprinted away from her father and into the bathroom. She’d called out in a garble that she needed to use the potty, but in reality, Beverly knew that the bathroom door had a good lock. Beverly’s father wouldn’t go so far as to kick the door down to get to her, Beverly knew that innately even when she couldn’t properly verbalize it (not that she would – Daddy had told her that telling people would get her taken away, and that was way worse).  

 

And, also.

 

“Welcome home, Beverly!”

 

Beverly twirled in her spot after shutting the door behind her, and looked up at the faultily-wired overhead light. It was blocked by a bulbous head framed with orange-red hair that was the very same shade as her own. The clown smiled goofily and straightened, shoulders back and chest out in an army recruit’s stance. His eyes were blazing in her direction.

 

“I’ve got an idea!” Said the clown, all but shouting in the tiny bathroom. “Do you want to hear it, Beverly?”

 

It was the cadence and volume of his voice that made the little girl fidget, and not necessarily because of the near manic change in personality of this beyond-tall figure next to her. She clapped her freckled hands over her ears dramatically and shook her head at him.

 

“Shh!” Beverly begged. “Daddy’s gonna hear!”

           

            The clown-man’s brows turned down into a deep v at the mention of Beverly’s father, but then his smile curled deviously. “What if we want him to hear us?”

 

The girl shook her head again. “No! That’s bad, ‘member?”

 

Her friend pouted, heedless. “But my idea! Do’ya wanna hear it? Do you, Beverly?”

 

            Beverly’s shoulders slumped. She liked it, having a friend to pop out of thin air (sometimes literally) and visit her after going so long without being able to make friends, but the clown could be such a handful. He could be downright unnerving too, when he reached out to her and pulled back lightening quick. The girl feared she might never get used to his presence, not after the first shock of meeting him, when he stood tall and proud and unreal in her bathroom just like tonight.

 

“It’s a good idea. The best idea!” He clapped softly. His painted smile stretched unnaturally wide, until it reached his ears. “Today is the day…”

 

“Today…?” Beverly whispered.

 

Pennywise nodded hurried, leaning in to whisper back. “Today we’re gonna get rid of ‘Daddy’.”

 

* * *

 

 

Blood was rancid and it reeked, stinking up the whole house. It’d been Beverly’s idea afterward, to stuff every sinkhole with cloth and toilet paper until the water pouring from every faucet in the apartment tipped over and began flooding the place. She’d grinned beautifully when Pennywise praised her, and they’d retreated to the solace of the bathroom. Safe, comfortable, a little messy and dribbling with blood and gore, but Beverly had never felt so special. Her friend had told her as much – only the very special could follow through with his brilliant ideas.

  

She reveled in the flood of water over her knees before the floor became too slippery, so much so that it only took one or two steps before Beverly found it alarming. There was blood that would never wash out of her dress still rot against her and making her uncomfortable as well, and Beverly deemed the water useless in helping her fix that problem rather shortly.

 

 She froze in place before falling on her back, shaking in her determination to remain upright, when she felt warm, solid hands lift her up by her underarms and pull her into the air. Bevvie squeaked in surprise before automatically clinging to the clown who’d lifted her, and she watched his colorful face in silence as she was nestled comfortably in his arms. The two regarded each other face to face; icy blue to caramel yellow joining to create some kinetic field to surround them, to bend the water that rushed from every faucet in the dingy bathroom to their will.

            It nearly took Beverly’s breath away, how she could physically feel the motion and energy beneath her skin with the help of this… person. A grin split his face in half, toothy and crinkling, laughing eyes that considered her like she was the most wonderful and gifted being to grace this Earth. Beverly was still afflicted by the confusion that had struck earlier, carving into her heart like lightening forever scarring the trunk of a tree.

She was too young to have a word for this Being that could embody how he was clearly dangerous, but adoring of her in the way most parents adored their children. Beverly’s father was, perhaps, now incapable of giving her that sort of sincere, companionable affection, if he’d ever been capable to begin with.

All Beverly was certain of, in her own simple way, was that she couldn’t remember a time when she’d felt loved without any discomfort. There were no edges nor drawn-out expectations that the clown had for her as she enveloped his gaze; nor anything more than lifted weariness and a warm thrum of joy when she eventually hung her head against his chest and exhaled like a tired kitten, ruffling the frills of his costume.

The clown patted her back after a long moment, resting his chin atop her head and those fiery curls. “There, there, pet.”

 

She wasn’t even crying, but Beverly let herself be comforted with only minor rigidity.

 

“ThERe. THerE.” Pennywise rocked from side to side slowly, gently, like he and little Beverly were caught up in a waltz. He could sense the decreasing defense of the little girl in his arms, and the smile he’d donned grew wider. The entity never would’ve guessed that a child’s comfort in his presence would be so welcome someday.

 

“Pennywise will protect you! He will, Beverly. He swears it.” He kept her close, even while slowly holding her out to study her freckled face again, solemn in a split second.

 

Beverly cackled as he bopped her nose and tickled beneath her chin. She was feeling lighter and lighter as she ducked away, as the rushing water far below her became harder to hear, so light she could float away. And then… she wasn’t even crying, or hadn’t thought she was. Beverly was suddenly assaulted by a lump in her throat. Her eyes were stinging and leaking slowly, so agonizingly slowly.  

 

“But, nobody ever does.” Her small voice overpowered the rest of the world. She tipped her head to one side, tipped into Pennywise’s waiting hand. “They say they will, but they don’t… Pennywise…”

 

Her eyelids drooped as sadness draped over her muscles like dampened cloth, overtaking the original numb acceptance from before. She let the clown’s – Pennywise’s – name hang in the air, not quite sure what to put after it. Pennywise simply stroked her hair away from her face and rumbled from deep within as he drew her into his chest again and hid the frown the marred his visage. His frown was even worse than his smile, so full of spite and teeth and _hate_.

 

“I know. Those LiARs-s-s.” The creature hissed above her ear. “They can’t help you – the CoWArDs that ThEy ARe… But I’m NoT tHem.”

 

Breath sizzled out of him like steam from an engine, burning and fizzling from his throat as he spat out a slew of hatred.  

 

“I’m-M-M BETTER THAN THEM!” He wheezed. The anger was falling back as the girl nuzzled closer into the crook of his neck, though if it were out of fear or because she liked the words falling from his lips, Pennywise didn’t know. He assumed them both and tampered the fog of fury that had built in his gullet.

 

 “You and I are BeTTEr, BevER Ly…” He held her dearly. “NO more ugly, unhappy things will hurt you from now on. Not while PENnywISE is here."

 

“I prOMise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently, I like to imagine Beverly thinking of Pennywise like an imaginary friend. Forgive me. Also, I'm sorry if this isn't super great.


	4. Take My Hand; Take My Whole Life Too

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If you don't succeed, try, try again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for pedophiliac undertones from a gross pharmacist, violence, and, yes, cannibalism.

_Wise men say only fools rush in_

_But I can’t help falling in love with you_

_Shall I stay? Would it be a sin?_

_If I can’t help falling in love with you_

 

Norbert Keene had stopped paying attention to the soundtrack that stroked across his pharmacy from every speaker sometime before lunch. Now, as he set about restocking, the familiar strum of a song from his childhood listed lazily in his brain. Keene absently sung along with the lyrics that teetered in and out of his consciousness, whilst shelving an entire stock of Anacin within the far reaches of its respective shelf.

            The anger over being left alone once again, when his daughter had promised him otherwise, had fell to the pit of the pharmacist’s stomach as Elvis Presley crooned within Greta had been meant to stay after and help him, but she’d skipped out on the deal from right under her father’s nose to go out with her friends. To date, this marked the fifth time she’d done it and gotten away with it, and though Mr. Keene’s ire over her disrespect had lulled, he still had the mind to wait while it boiled inside. He’d be working late once more because of her, and Keene had the mind to return home and scream about it to his wife.

 

Fat lot of good that that would do, however. Mr. Keene snorted quietly as the strings of a guitar followed the image of Mrs. Keene, arms up like she had something to fear outside of her husband’s shouting. She was a frail, thin and curve-less woman, his wife, with no imagination nor daring spark within her. Always mumbling her words and giving him lifeless, limp smiles across their quiet dining room table – it was a wondrous miracle that their only child had a backbone at all.

            The pharmacist counted that in Greta’s favor, imagining the proud toss of her frizzy blonde hair and she glared up at him with eyes framed by black mascara. Her mother had tried to talk Greta out of wearing makeup, at least until she was a junior or senior in high school. Norbert had had no qualms about it however. Their daughter was very beautiful, why not flaunt it?  

 

Although, Keene had to admit that he hoped his daughter wasn’t a slut, at the same time. What kind of a father would he be to let that happen?

 

 

“Mister! Hey Mister!”

 

The pharmacist’s head snapped up automatically, face already contorted over the thought that it was after hours. And Norbert hadn’t heard the bell above the pharmacy door chime, not that he should’ve after locking up for the night.

 

* * *

 

They’d had their fill on left-overs that morning and afternoon, but Beverly had convinced Pennywise to let her make a try for it. Hunting on her own, that is.

 

Beverly was the most audacious of his children, that was a certainty. She waggled her fingers in Mr. Keene’s direction, smiling innocently and witnessed the middle-aged man smiling back promptly. His brows rose slightly, but it was the flash in his eyes and the quick dart of his irises down from her open face to her chest and her legs were something curious that she recognized. Another kind of predator was in the girl’s midst, that sent her stomach rolling her teeth on edge just behind the painful smirk she kept up.

 

            She’d decided to go after a full-grown adult this time, with minor conditions such as waiting for whatever fool she picked to be alone, and that she not go out on her own unsupervised. Beverly had whined over her Pen’s decision to include a few of the boys in their hunting party, Ben and Bill, but she’d acquiesced after some time.

If neither of her brothers hinder her plans, then Beverly could handle it.

If Pennywise adhered to her rule, that he stayed out of sight and let her do this on her own, then Beverly could handle it.

 

Or so she’d thought, before she realized just what her target was.

 

* * *

 

Ben plucked another few cards from one of the shelves in the pharmacy and sifted through them. He was fond of the glittery ones, and liked to rub away the sequins on the gaudier monstrosities to flick at his brother Bill while they remained quiet and tucked away. He wished he could see Beverly in action, but both he and his brother were only backup at this stage in her act. And Ben was the last one to provoke their father for the hell of it.

 

Bill shushed him before leaning into the shelf full of cards, looking silly as he tried to climb up and listen to what was going on. The slightly older boy took some things much too seriously, in Ben’s opinion.

 

“Hello there.” Mr. Keene said from a little far off, polite and a little smarmy.

 

Before him, Beverly swayed forward and then back, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her mostly-clean dress. She continued to smile pleasantly, as Mr. Keene was already standing to his full height and advancing.

 

“I’m sorry, dear. I thought I’d locked the front door.” He laughed. “I’m afraid we’re close for the night.”

 

The man swept a hand through his blonde hair almost bashfully, taking in the little girl all by her lonesome. She was a pretty little thing, thin and nimble, with the sweetest blue eyes he’d ever seen. In them was a slight flutter of nervousness, an innocence that had Mr. Keene biting his lower lip. He wondered where her parents were, noting that she couldn’t have been any older than Greta was.

 

“But… my friend…” Beverly worked to get the words out, nerve running thin as the much taller, much older man slid forward against the slick tiles below them. Language was failing her just as quickly, turning her skin into a clammy patchwork stretched over her muscles and bones. It was all because of that Look that Mr. Keene was plying her with, because of the advance of his grasshopper long legs, pitched against the whitewash of his sterile pharmacist coat.

 

            She’d practiced. Beverly had practiced what she was going to say beforehand but now found her mouth falling open, words lost in the swimming haze settling over her brain. Her mind flailed as Mr. Keene stopped in front of her, kneeling to get a better look at her reddening face.

 

“Your friend what?” His mouth moved over the words, making them sound lewd. He was leering at her now, so close that she could feel his sour breath prickling her skin. But it was the shape of his brow, wrinkling as his gaze became scrutinizing, that set her heart racing.

 

“You know something, sweetheart?” Mr. Keene said, inflection rising. “You look a bit familiar…”

 

“Mm… My… My friend…” She tried again, but started sweating. The palm of the man’s hand was laid flat against her cheek, and Mr. Keene turned her from side to side.

 

“I’ve never seen you at Greta’s school before, though… What’s your name?” He asked dully, not entirely focused on getting an answer.

 

Mr. Keene’s mind was working overtime, torn between remembering why this girl looked so familiar and feeling a rush of pleasure at the power he had over her. She was trembling like a leaf beneath him, pretty eyes wide and frightened, and Norbert found it… quite nice.

 

“Wait…” Light touched beneath the thick spectacles against Mr. Keene’s face. “I have seen you… I’ve seen your face at the DPD Station –”

 

Beverly whimpered. Keene’s fingers tightened around her jaw.

 

Bill had reached the top of the shelf, and stared the scene before him in horror. “B-Beverly!”

 

Keene’s head whipped up at the sound, and he spied the boy who’d cried out, just before Bill fell from his perch. “There’s more of you?!”

 

Beverly panicked, ripping out of Mr. Keene’s grasp.

 

She fell back onto the tiled floor, expression momentarily slacking into surprise and an idle ghost of fear. As fast as wildfire came the recognizable bass of a rumble, one which the girl felt coming from beneath the very ground as though it were about to split so that a volcano might rise from the center of the earth. It wasn’t a warning for Beverly so much as it was one part soothing another encouraging. She took strength from the concern, the rage, the fealty behind the sound – one which she wasn’t entirely sure was audible to human ears – and kicked hard at the glossy tiles beneath her.

           

Mr. Keene landed on hard on his knees, falling short of landing on the young girl both literally and figuratively. He groaned upon impact, though it wasn’t enough for him to break a bone nor split his knee. The man recovered in record time and was already lashing out, grabbing hold of the little girl’s ankle with one hand and looking up with a victorious grin.

 

“Hold on a second, kid! I remember you now! I –”

 

The grin died as soon as Norbert Keene realized that he wasn’t the only one holding onto the redheaded girl. There was another, something enormous and pale and gauzy in fabrics too old for this century – a clown.

            Said clown grinned at him, but the smile was humorless. It wrapped tight around the lower half of the clown’s skull, so tightly that it looked as if at any moment that unnaturally pale face could tear in half and reveal the intricacies of its jaw in gruesome detail.

 

It was too big, too taut, and too cold – a grin that was spoke of eminent danger before Mr. Keene could categorize it in any way that made sense. Before his eyes, the clown had Beverly snug against him, one snake-like arm swathed around her and unreal black claws digging through her copper hair.

 

The clown pressed her against his shoulder calmly, stroking her hair as though comforting a baby from a nightmare, while his other arm lunged with merciless speed. Mr. Keene’s offending hand was yanked off Beverly’s ankle and briefly enclosed in those bizarre, dark claws. Finally, the man did scream, hysterically so, as the clown crushed his hand slowly until the bones beneath were but brittle and dust.

 

Pennywise played like it was nothing while Mr. Keene continued to scream and wail, his blubbering like that of a dying animal. Instead, the alien took to rolling Beverly’s head back gently, gazing as she refused to look at him.

 

“Mouse.” Pennywise murmured. “Don’t be afRaID to look at me.”

 

            The florescent light from above bounced off her blue eyes, shining up at him in apology. “‘M sorry, Pen.”

 

            Pennywise cooed at her broken words, a pang shooting through his being at her shame. “No, no. No reason to be sorry, my sweet. You did very well!”

 

As he spoke, Pennywise pulled the screaming pharmacist forward until the man’s blonde hair touched the clown’s knee. Pennywise caressed the back of Beverly’s curls, tilting her closer to press a kiss to her forehead, before setting his sights back on the irritating human.

 

“It’s loud.” Beverly quipped after a moment, nerve returning as she looked beyond the safety of her father’s frills and bells.

 

“YEs. VeRy.” Pennywise harrumphed. He looked at the girl sideways. “He SHouLD SHuT Up!”

 

Beverly giggled, bouncing on the clown’s knee before she nodded at Mr. Keene and they watched his head pull against gravity’s hold. His neck was craned back to an unnatural angle, before the man was slammed face first into the floor several times over. The pair kept giggling at their own private circus, as Mr. Keene fell limp and bleeding into the cracks he’d made.

 

* * *

 

It might’ve been more practical to use the ordinary front door of the caravan – to wipe their shoes on the mat before heading inside the strangely roomy cart first – but Pennywise was not known for turning down a dramatic entrance. He’d let the stage of the side cart slam down upon their arrival, and had watched Beverly, Ben, and Bill pile in first. Those awaiting them, namely Mike, Stan, Richie, Eddie, and little Georgie, had sprung from their restless pacing to greet them, as lively as was to be expected.  

 

“Pop! Pop! Pop!” Georgie squealed, skipping around the caravan with delight. He gravitated toward Bill, as Pennywise was still shuffling inside behind the other children with Mr. Keene’s body slumped over his shoulder. The body was dumped to the carpeted floor, where it thudded as heavily as an anvil upon concrete.

 

Pennywise bowed low to the bedraggled eight, head tipping to one side like a showman’s as his lips stripped back and exposed a delicate grin.

 

 _How nice, it came with its own little death null._ The clown thought.

 

“Thank your sister, children. It was Beverly who chose this one.”

 

A chorus of soft, hoarse voices followed the thud, the sound of Pennywise’s cobbled voice, as the children gathered on hands and knees to peer at the corpse laid before them. “Thank you, Beverly!”

 

Georgie butted his head very lightly against Beverly’s shoulder, nuzzling into her tousled hair when she lay down on her belly to hide the beet-red rising in her cheeks. “Bevvie!”

 

It was an adorable sight, one that made Pennywise’s form stutter and the saliva pooling in his mouth less consistent as he admired his two children. The normal order of things was always chaotic, but these little instants when the children were gracious and gentle with one another were blessings in disguise.

Then, Pennywise cleared his throat. Back to business. Already, his brood were clamoring for food, so close to the freshly killed pharmacist that there was little room for the clown to hunker down with them in their circle.

 

By degrees, they were behaving well, knowing to wait for when their Pen affirmed that they could begin eating.

 

Pennywise’s children had blunt teeth, to be sure, but Georgie only had his baby teeth to contend with. He had trouble sinking deeply into the flesh all by himself, until Pennywise leaned in close, earning the gaze of his youngest. The baby always ate first, therefore he had to be there first, when Pennywise cracked out a set of large incisors and dug them into Mr. Keene’s clothed shoulder.

 

The alien inclined his head in Georgie’s direction, making sure that his youngest was watching with rapt attention. Then, Pennywise effortlessly dragged his fangs through the man’s skin and muscle, dissecting him from shoulder to elbow. It was easy for the clown to slice into Keene’s flesh and muscle, even through the coat, as it would be for a knife to go through wet paper, and yet Pennywise had much more precision. The wound gaped slowly, paring open like the flaps of a cardboard box, with blood slavering out like wine from an overflowing cup, deeply red against the crisp white clothes and the damp, dark field below the limb.

Georgie canted forward, but Bill was beside him in an instant, keeping the smaller boy from rushing forward too quickly to lick up the blood leaking out onto the grass. Bill gestured with a free arm, lifting an index finger to signal for Georgie to wait another moment before racing ahead.

 

            Bone, white as snow amid the dark red, peach, and pus yellow emerged from inside, entangled in sinew and veins that crawled it like ivy. Pennywise sought the ligament connecting the humerus bone to its ulna and radius and, with his progeny watching, snapped them apart with two skilled fingers.

Georgie shrieked with laughter at the great _POP!_ that came from Pennywise’s act, and he clapped as if the clown had performed some great feat of magic. Bill beamed, unable to stop himself from grinning with red-stained teeth as Pennywise nodded in affirmation. The rest of the children milled up to the body and began to paw around the rest of it, tearing at the pharmacist’s coat, undershirt, and khaki pants. All while both Georgie and Bill were swept up onto Pennywise’s lap and given special leeway to devour Keene’s newly-sliced arm.   

 

The cosmic horror kept his enormous hands around Georgie’s midsection, to brace him as Georgie leaned on his elbows and slurped from the divot that Penny had made.

 

Pennywise wondered, in the meantime between the children feeding and he, himself getting the chance, how he’d survived so long without Georgie’s laughter and excitement during meals. How many centuries has Pennywise engorged itself all alone, without the contented sounds of its happy children doing the same?

 

Far too many.

 

“Georgie.” Pennywise sing-songed lightly. The alien reached around the boy’s torso to wipe Georgie’s blood-splattered face, and fell victim to the boy’s little teeth gnawing into his elegant white fingers. It was clumsy, a bite that hardly hurt, and yet the clown sucked in a breath like he’d been truly wounded. And like clockwork, the baby of his brood smiled broadly at being the cause of an injury.  

 

            The enthusiasm that the child radiated was positively contagious, and Pen tried to school in his giggling over it by surveying the rest of his children. They’d taken their cue to go ahead and start munching after Georgie, and Pennywise’s perceptive golden gaze took them in one by one.

Ben was suffering the same messy appearance, but a quick, pointed look from Pennywise reminded the pudgier boy to rub his face against the dew grass after every bite. Bill had taken to neatly ripping off the detached left hand and sat cross-legged beside their father, biting around the bone like one might eat around the core of an apple. Beverly’s back was turned on Pennywise as she dug in, over Georgie’s wispy head.

 

Nothing was out of the ordinary there, not until Pennywise had to start; the sound of watery gurgling and a few dry heaves began within earshot. It was a known sound, and yet that didn’t keep the clown’s expression from twitching to an anxious and deep frown. The clown’s torso stretched and twisted, into a pose that might’ve been uncomfortable for a regular skeletal system. He located the source instantly, and was snatching up Stanley’s chin reflexively with an angry hum of disapproval. Roughly, Pennywise swiped at the blood and meat that oozed down the curly-haired boy’s lips while glaring.

 

 “CHeW!” Pennywise’s voice crawled from his made-up vocal chords like claws scraping a paved road. “A Nd wHaT HAvE I ToLD yoU? SmaLleR pieCes, S-s-STANley!”

 

The boy’s locks bounced around his ears as he averted his gaze and slowed the ravenous quaffing he’d done. Richie and he had managed to open the pharmacist’s chest and they’d gotten, quite unsurprisingly, carried away while breaking the dead man’s ribcage themselves. Stan had decided to crawl around with a sizeable portion of lung and had tried to hide it so that no one else could have any, but of course that plan had backfired.

            An inhuman snarl rose from Pennywise’s diaphragm, directed at Stanley and then the rest of them, whom the monster had had his back turned for a mere moment. No one knew how mischievous these children could become if you looked away for a mere second as well as their father did. This was especially true during mealtimes, when both Mike and Bill were supposed to feeding like the rest of them.  

 

Eddie scrubbed around his mouth too hard, enough to chafe the skin around his frail lips, and Mike was playing with his separable pieces of meat more than eating them. Beverly wouldn’t even look at him anymore. The mood had soured then, as Stan slowly passed beneath one of Pennywise’s arms and returned to the group, mulling and moping while he did.

 

Pennywise sighed and stood apart from them, the fizzle of its irritation over their lack of manners beginning to flatten and die. He drummed his gloved fingers against the trailer wall while his brood continued to eat, though less enthusiastically.  It was Pennywise’s hunger that did this to him, for the monster was not nearly so prone to screeching at any of his children otherwise. He bemoaned the fact, displeasure pulsating from his being like the steady burn of the Dead-Lights themselves, before a bloody hand interrupted his view.

 

            Pennywise swallowed back spit, the glitch in his consciousness piecing back together into one, absorbent whole. Before him was Beverly, teeth-gnashing in his direction before she held out her other hand and presented Pennywise with Mr. Keene’s heart. Blood leaked from its pumps and valves, sloshing onto the dull ash-colored floor just beyond the sidecar’s flooring, and

 

Beverly quirked a smile at him, hopeful face dappled rather prettily with freckles and blood, and her father wondered if she was gifting him with food just to snatch it away when he was at his most vulnerable.

The alien didn’t hide his thoughts from the girl, and when her smile widened to reveal her shining teeth, she reminded Pennywise so much of himself in that moment that the clown couldn’t help but feel profoundly touched.

 

            Bev shook her head and looked at him like he was too silly for words, with marvelous eyes full of mirth. When Pennywise took the heart from her hand, she gave it up without a fuss as though her good-natured scheming wasn’t a big deal. Pennywise pulled her forward with the offering and hugged her to him as he eyed the pharmacist’s heart, still dripping over Penny’s lily-white gloves.

 

The clown stopped before taking a bite.

 

_You’re all going to need baths after this._

Pennywise said, without moving Its lips.

 

He grinned gaily, taking a mighty chomp out of the broken organ in his claws.

 

A crescendo of groans and objections followed the snap of Pennywise’s fangs through the meat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like a river flows surely to the sea
> 
> Darling so it goes
> 
> Some things are meant to be...


	5. Dreams Birds With One Stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Child Abduction, neglect, some disturbing sexual subject matter between two children, and violence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought this would be one of the shorter chapters. No. 
> 
> Heads up, the sexual material and that which can be construed as sexual in any way is not meant to be seen positively. This is definitely supposed to be disturbing and not something for you to get your jollies from. It starts when Henry and Patrick are introduced, so please be advised.

 “Look.”

 

Stanley sighed, pursing his lips as he stared at Richie’s hand. The boy across from his was a nuisance when it came to showboating, that much was clear. And Stanley found that be a certainty despite having only met the kid today.

            There weren’t too many children that were Richie and Stan’s age that came to the synagogue, and none aside from the two boys that stayed after for lukewarm orange juice and flaky donuts on after Shabbat morning. Stanley knew that Mrs. Berman had a two-year-old daughter she kept nearby while meeting with the other parents. And there was an infant boy that (he assumed but never asked) belonged to Mr. Aaron and was being raised by his grandmother. However, in general Stan was the only kid who stayed behind and kept stuck and silent while the adults chattered in a circle above his head.

            Until Mrs. Tozier decided to hang around, muttering quietly with Stanley’s father, while her mop-head son perked up like a firework the instant he saw Stan.

 

“Look! Are you looki – You’re not looking Stan-man!” Richie shouted.

 

The boy was so loud. And maybe he was Stan’s age, and maybe Stan’s father had smiled politely and told him to go off and make friends – but Stan couldn’t help wishing that Richie hadn’t come there at all. While Stanley was quiet and disposed to thinking to himself more than speaking to others, the Tozier boy was brash and said whatever he wanted to anyone.

 

            “Don’t call me that. M’name’s Stanley.” Stan grumbled back. No doubt about it, Richie was annoying, too.

 

Stan would’ve preferred being alone that morning, since the synagogue was interesting when you could be hands-on without anyone calling him out. Now he was outside and his bottom was wet from the grass below them, because Richie had dared him to sit. He’d goaded Stanley, just because Stan had made a fuss how wet his shoes were getting.  

 

“Why’re… why you showing me?” Stan asked between exhalations, fidgeting with the leaves that had fallen around them. He was ripping up dewy blades of grass and clumps of leaves in anxiety, still irritated over having to prove himself able to sit in the wet earth.

 

Stan crossed his arms. “Go show your mom if it’s so important.”

 

“No!” Richie knocked against Stan’s shoulder with his knuckles, receiving a sharp shove in return. “I don’t show her. I don’t show anybody, just you.”

 

“Why?” His partner whined.

 

            Richie’s smile was blinding, and his irises darted behind his glasses to the fist that he held out to Stan. Stan gazed at the boy’s hand again, as though moved by a magnetic pull of some kind.

Richie’s hand opened slowly, although Stan had caught movement from inside as well as light glowing through the thin skin of Richie’s small fingers. Stan felt like a stone had dropped into his chest, making everything twist around inside until his chest seemed to compress and make even his throat feel too tight. He couldn’t turn away from the ball of light floating from Richie’s palm, bright and small and soft. It floated lazily at Richie’s command, as though it were one of the fairies that Stan heard of in storybooks, but there were no wings to keep it in the air.

 

“Why?” Stan questioned again, voice drawn low.

 

“You can do it.” Richie leaned in, perching all his body weight on one hand. “Right?”

 

The first thing Stan wanted to do was say ‘no’ and push Richie away. It would’ve been easy to do, and Stan wasn’t old enough to have tempered his personality and behavior. His shyness was innate, but it didn’t extend to everything.

            And Stanley could remember that very morning before Shabbat – he always woke up early to the birdsong, and they’d been singing in a dark blue sky before he opened the window. He’d opened it without getting out from under the warmth of his covers, all trussed up in his big boy’s bed. Birdies had flown in the magically-lifting sill of the window, and a little robin had rested on his belly above the blankets for a while. No, making a ball of light wasn’t something that he’d ever done, but Stan had also made the pages of books in his dad’s library flip without touching them. Stan had made the pictures in picture frames move and smile at him when he was alone in a room.

 

“Other people… can…” Stan muttered hesitantly.

 

Richie’s brow furrowed, and the color of his eyes turned slate. “They can’t.”

 

“How d’you know?”

 

            Richie shook his head, scruffy hair whipping around his pale shoulders. The light lowered into his hand and he cupped it like it was a living creature in his frail grasp.

 

“I feel it when I look.” Richie said matter-of-factly. “Everyone’s dark inside, but you’re… sunshine! Like sunshine, Stan-man.”  

 

* * *

 

Mr. Uris and Mrs. Tozier had been talking for a very long time, so long that one had to wonder if they remembered their children at all.  

 

            It was not yet afternoon, but the service at the Uris Congregation at taken place bright and early in the morning. The sun had already risen to its highest point while Stanley and Richie continued to muck around in the tall grass out back. They played a host of games, all the games that they both knew how to play, for Richie was hopeless at following any that he hadn’t known of before and that had more than two rules.

            Stanley had discovered that while his dislike of the scruffier boy lost its intensity, he was still exasperated by Richie’s boundless energy. Had he been older and had more experience in the world, perhaps Stanley would’ve been tackled by a sense of self-awareness with that feeling. But at four-years-old, the nuance of unsaid meaning was lost on Stan.

 

            “Richie! Wait!” Stan stumbled over his shoelaces while trying to speed up and slow down at the same time. There was a gently sloping hill down from the congregation feeding into the edge of the Barrens.

 

“Hurry up, slow-poke!” Richie caterwauled instead of waiting.

 

He was already lying on his tummy and beginning to tumble down, disappearing like an inkspot against the horizon of the hillside before Stan could stop him.

The pair had crossed quite a distance, for them, to get to it and while it was very fun to roll down, it was the sort of place that often required adult supervision. The Barrens were illustriously dark and full of depth. Just looking at the massive wall of trees like guard posts to keep all its secrets within made Stan imagine it to be and other-world of mystery.

             

Nevertheless, Stan stalled. He looked back at the synagogue from over his shoulder, and the saw the familiar brick patterns of his father’s pride and joy rising above everything else like a shining beacon. It was a complete contrast to the rough, wild, irrational up ahead.

Since learning about it, and being told never to go into that area, Stan had had the conflicting mindset of a too-serious child. In one mind, he wanted to do the exact opposite of what he’d been told and go exploring the only woods he’d ever known. Woods that, from every angle, looked just as impressive as those from bedtime fairytales. In the other mind, Stan was too afraid to disobey and too likely to justify the safety entailed in those rules. The other mind was always the correct one, but Stan had to admit as he followed Richie’s shrinking body flopping up and over that that mind wasn’t nearly as fun.

 

_Go on… Have fun… Play._

 

The wind carried through Stanley’s curly locks, and he grinned hesitantly before huddling to the ground floor. He winced at the feeling of the clammy dirt below, but tried to ignore it while getting in position. Soon, Stan was dropping from the top of the drop-off, a burst of laughter in his wake as his little body spun against the tide of gravity.

 

“Richie!” Stan smiled as he stood up while wiping the stains on his pants and shirt. He didn’t like the squishy mud and blades of grass that had caked onto his clothes, for they didn’t feel nice, but he found himself happy to have fallen. “Richie?”

 

“Where’re you?” Stan asked of the air, the grass, the empire-state tall trees. They loomed now that he’d reached near their roots, and without another person there. Stan’s mood was quickly plummeting

 

            Richie wasn’t at the bottom of the slope, but Stan squinted around until he saw the boy’s striped shirt and shaggy hair nearer to the Barrens trees. Stan walked until he was right behind Richie, an exasperated frown on his face.

 

“Richie.” He said flatly. The tone was meant to tell his friend that he’d scared Stan, when Stan didn’t want to admit being scared. He was a big boy, and big boys didn’t frighten easily.

 

“Hey!” Stan smacked Richie’s shoulder. “Listen! Listen to me!”

 

_Come one, come all…_

 

Richie turned, eyes blazing not out of anger but in awed disbelief. “Stan…!”

 

Richie shouted, pointing forward violently. “The sun!”  

 

Stanley tsk’d automatically, but his eyes followed in Richie’s desired direction regardless. Stan wasn’t only mature for his age like Mama said, but he was observant as well. If the sun had suddenly fallen into the Barrens, he would’ve noticed it, just as everyone else would’ve noticed it too. And Stan doubted that Richie, who didn’t appear to notice what wasn’t right in front of him, probably would not have noticed such a humongous event unless it were burning his face off.

 

“No! The sun is up… up there…” Stan argued futilely, trailing off as he was taken with the orbs of light ringing around thin tree trunks.

The lights were scalding like fire, emitting flame from their orbit like suns and flaring into a large heated mass as they came together as one, like a sun. Neither child was harmed or impaired by those qualities, however, they simply couldn’t look away from the dancing display.  

 

            “Then what’re they? What. Are they?” Richie slowly inquired. He’d begun to speak, while stumbling over some broken branches and litter upon the ground.

 

Richie was set to chase the floating orbs despite there being no origin from which they’d come from, nor an explanation for what they were. The light was warm and inviting, beckoning even. That was more than enough of an incentive for Richie to let it lead the way.  

Stan was pushed forward like gravity were still at work – the Barrens had a gravitational pull of its very own, it seemed. “You made ‘em.”

 

_Stanley…_

Leaves above them shook lazily in the breeze, shivering and whispering. The cold wind never extinguished the lights that bade them to follow and Richie was already disappearing once again, behind the trunks three times his size. It would’ve been wrong, and bad, for Stan to let him go chasing after these strange things (fairies? Lightening bugs?) alone.

 

“…Nuh-uh…” Richie’s voice came from far away.

 

_Stanley… Stanley… Stanley boy…_

 

_Richie! Richie… come here… come here…_

            Stan had, like most little boys and girls, been read bedtime stories. He was still growing, but as he entangled his hand with Richie’s, Stan couldn’t help relating what was happening now to what he’d only heard of from books. The comparison was abstract and incoherent, a visual menagerie where Red Riding Hood met Hansel and Gretel, chasing crumbs to Grandma’s house. Their feet were burning, Hansel was blind and snagged by thorns, and it was a daydream that shifted non-linearly in Stan’s mind. Stan was mildly spooked when the fantasy ended again and again and again, always with the three children being snatched into the wolf’s den.  

 

_Come here boys… come here to me…_

 

What came after, Stan didn’t know.

 

* * *

 

Henry had punched Patrick in the throat, and now he was running after the (slightly) taller boy as though his life were a bet on it.

 

In the pudgy boy’s defense, Patrick had it coming. He was Henry’s oldest ‘friend’ and had seemed to think he was entitled to do anything he wanted to Henry with the title over his head.

            This wasn’t limited to things like sharing lunch, toys and the like, not after ten minutes prior to their race. They’d shared secrets, although Patrick’s were more malevolent and not convincing, such as when he’d gleefully cupped Henry by the ear and told him that he, Patrick, had killed his baby brother.

Patrick never asked to share, he usually took what he wanted and could only be reeled in by Henry’s physical abuse, thereby becoming Henry’s friend. It seemed that there was a catch to that unspoken agreement, as Patrick had decided on that Saturday that he wanted to see his friend’s genitals.

            He’d garnished the demand with nice words, polite words that any six or seven-year-old child was capable of retaining. Patrick had made Henry feel self-conscious over it, to the point where he’d been close to pulling his pants down for Patrick’s benefit. Henry didn’t understand his friend’s fixation or his want, but he’d frozen when Pat made the decision for them both. He’d knocked Henry down and torn off his pants before staring at and pulling Henry’s penis out of his underwear.

It had taken Henry more than a minute to understand that what was happening was _really_ happening. He’d been entranced by how his body grew at Patrick’s touch, and his tummy squirmed like he was being tickled from the inside out, but then he became cold. Boys didn’t do this to each other, Henry realized, and friends definitely didn’t do this to each other. So, Henry had pushed Patrick off, pulled up his pants and stared at the other boy before punching Patrick as hard as he could.

If something scared you, you got mad. You beat the shit out of it – Dad said so, and Henry lived by his Dad’s every word.

 

Henry had to.

 

Patrick had also been the one to grin and laugh, to make the hunt into some kind of game. Henry was blusteringly mad, but Patrick handled it blissfully. He’d gracefully run into the Barrens near the train yard (the one that Dad didn’t know they went to) and skipped around the trees. Patrick didn’t feel any danger with the wind at his back and the grass flinging from beneath his feet, even when Henry pounced on him sooner rather than later. They weren’t too deep into the woods when Henry pulled Patrick into a headlock and shouted against him. Rage curdled inside of Henry while Patrick laughed and kept laughing till he was out of breath.  

 

“Henry!” He wheezed from under Henry’s armpit, giggling.

 

“Shut up!” Henry retorted, but he was beginning to lose his grip on Patrick.

 

Patrick was being loosened from the chokehold against his friend’s better judgment, lips curled into a conniving sneer. “But I saw somethin’.”

 

“Don’t care!”

 

“No, Henry. I saw the Jew boy back there.” The taller boy stood up again. “I saw him and a four-eyes over there.”

 

Patrick was totally free and skipping again, this time around a different set of trees while Henry picked up on the fact that they were deep in the Barrens and he had no way of finding a way out. No way out of these scary, dark woods. You couldn’t beat the shit out of trees and make them cry for scaring you, Henry knew that.

 

“You swear?” Henry followed, grumbling while pushing low-hanging branches out of his face.

 

Patrick answered by shushing him, halting behind a tree and hiding until he and Henry were both silent. They were ready to jump out in a sneak attack when Henry sought a stream of light surrounding the two children. It was momentarily off-putting, yet the light of three miniature suns winked out of existence when Henry blinked and shook the creepy-crawly shivers down his spine.

 

Something was wrong, prompting the Bowers boy to jump out like a wild rabbit, landing just outside of the little circle that the four-year-olds had made.

 

“Jew boy!” Henry snarled, happy and angry all at once. He was glad that Pat hadn’t been lying, and fast forgetting what had happened prior to them entering the Barrens. Watching the smaller, weaker boys squeak and startle up from his shouting made the discomfort from before disappear into a fuzzy haze.

 

“And four-eyes.” Pat sneered, skulking toward the children.

 

He, too, liked how visibly scared the kids were, so much so that he yearned to see those expressions up close. In reaction, Patrick led the charge in lieu of Henry, running straight at Richie and Stan whilst they cried out in alarm.

The tussle was short-lived, for Henry and Patrick had numbers on their side. Richie and Stan were too small to win the battle, and Richie cried as sharply as any infant while his arm was twisted behind his back. Patrick snickered, catching Richie’s glasses as they fell from his face and holding them away from the little boy.

Stan, meanwhile, ducked from Henry’s punches, yet fell for Henry driving a foot into his shin. He screamed when the pain shot up into his bones and made his legs give way.

 

Stanley landed face first into the ground, struggling with all his might as Henry’s foot pressed on his head. Beside them, Richie began to sob desperately. His tears made the blurred, spinning images of the forest around him become less distinguishable from everything else, and impaired him as far as putting up a fight.

 

The rest of the world was hauntingly unobtrusive and unfeeling as the chaos reigned, as Patrick pushed Richie to the ground next to Stan.

 

“What’d we do now?” Pat asked, forever smiling. His companion didn’t know why, but an idea instantaneously grew in his shallow mind.

 

“Pee on ‘em.” Henry backed away from Stanley, who was breathing raggedly. Richie pawed at him, clinging to Stan’s shirt and curls to keep steady as he continued crying.

 

“Sick!” Patrick was already unbuttoning his jeans, and though Henry was slower to the movement, he too began to pull his pants down for the second time that day.

 

* * *

 

 

Something enormous dove down from the treetops between the luckless boys. It struck the ground and Stan was certain that the Earth trembled while trying to support the striking white and red animal that landed upon it. Quickly, he reached for and grabbed hold of Richie before pulling the scrawny child to him. Stan shielded Richie, terror on both their greyed faces, while the most terrifying roar bellowed ahead of them.           

The growl silenced everything in its awake, aside from the clear sway of the trees that cowered before the beast. No birds sang, no squirrels chittered nor climbed the thick tree trunks, but while dunking for cover Stan and Richie both recognized the garbled screams that followed it. Henry shrieked the loudest, having soiled his pants while groping at the ground with clawing nails as he sought a way out. Richie’s glasses were smacked from his grip and buckled below the human-shaped beast attacking him. Patrick had not fallen, but he was backed against a tree stump, eyes as wide as they could possibly get.

 

A warped skull, like that of a desert-dwelling steer’s cranium, that had been set on fire hovered above them. It was death incarnate, yet animated by the peeling muscle and flesh that schlicked to the ground like heavy raindrops met their gaze. It hung on a crooked pole of a spin, arced and bloody with bones that stuck out of its sides like a lizard’s spine, rising from a visible chest cavity tearing through the flesh and cotton of the monster’s suit. Its teeth were sharp and endless, gleaming in the backdrop of the darkness all around them while bared with fury.

 The young bullies were scarred permanently, so much so that in the span of a second they went from paralyzed to sprinting in different directions. They were tearing through the thin edge of the wood as though their lives depended on it – and it very well could have.

Their disappearance from the scene was swift and noted with little interest apart from a deeply displeased rumble that rose into the woods. The melody made the forest come alive in every eerie way possible, until it too seemed to sound like an otherworldly animal. The monster that had spared them did the ever-more unthinkable by seeking respite after, feeling the damp dirt beneath until his fingers fell over a curiously artificial object. As he ogled the aid, the Entity transformed from what it had been to a ‘normal’ form, and its ugly eyes bowled into the reshaped eye sockets. Those eyes slowly became a natural shade of blue.   

 

The clown stared at the glasses in hand, then ‘tsk’d while tossing them away and into the underbrush. His focus returned to the two boys lying side by side, staring at him with guileless eyes. The thrill of the chase, the promise of salted meat from Bowers and Hockstetter’s guts was nothing compared to these boys that were more dazed than stunned at the sight of ol’ Pennywise.

 

            Pennywise was rather pleased at the sparks that emitted between the boys and himself. Both children were projecting out of fear, befitting of any living creature that had some sense, but Richie’s energy was being pushed to its limit. He was so young and frail-looking, half-groomed but for the cuts on his face from the thorn bushes, but he was a fighter.

 It was compelling for Pennywise, who already counted these children as belonging to him, that one brother had gone so far as to protect the other with his life. Compelling and charming, endearing the clown to his little mop-headed boy without preamble.

 

The protective screen wasn’t difficult to shatter for Pennywise, whether they were a sign of bravery or not. Richie was too young to be well-adept at his capabilities and couldn’t overpower Pennywise in his wildest dreams.

 

The alien shook his head after staring them down. Stan wasn’t being worked so hard, but his ability to look Fear in the face was staggering. Already, Pennywise was proud enough to ignite.

 

“Here.” Pennywise said softly. He sounded as hushed and rhythmic as the leaves in the wind as he held out one gloved hand. “All is well, children. I’ve made it so.”

 

Richie opened his mouth, but was too exhausted to speak while Stan kept to his guns in the confusing haze. Their energies were absolutely zapped and they were falling again, floating again, like soap bubbles never meant to last in the material world.

 

“I’lL FiGht for YoU Both NOw.” The orb-like bells ringing around the clown’s wrist rang, even before one little hand fit into his perfectly and he pulled the pair up all at once. “Keep yoU SaFE. JuST ME. FoREVER.”

 

_You both came here, to me._


End file.
